Deliberate practice in the working world.
A while back I talked about “deliberate practice” in the context of Will Smith’s career. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has been a pioneer in codifying deliberate practice and what it means.
In a nutshell, deliberate practice is the sort of self-sharpening work done by the very best practitioners in a field. It’s the sort of always-getting-better discipline shared by the best athletic performers (think Tiger Woods), the best musicians (think Yo-Yo Ma), or the best . . . well, the best anything, potentially.
While I was first introduced to the concept by a Geoff Colvin article in Fortune magazine, I think we’ve barely, barely tapped the potential of this idea for changing the way we think of our individual performances in the working world. It’s an idea I plan to return to in future posts.
This post, meanwhile, is one of those publish-it-now, keep-adding-later numbers: I’m going to use it for collecting links to interesting items on deliberate practice. Here’s my list as it stands now:
- [PDF link!] Anders Ericsson et al.: “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” — This is the article that started it all. (A summary of the article is available here.)
- Geoff Colvin in Fortune magazine: What it takes to be great
- Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: A Star Is Made: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly
- WiseBread: How to become an expert
- The Practice of Leadership: Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership
- Daniel Goleman: Peak Performance: Why Records Fall
- Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice: An updated excerpt from Ericsson (2000)
- The Age (of Australia): E=mc2 (and a lot of hard work)
- The Sydney Morning Herald: Why only the right kind of practice gets anywhere near perfect
- On his blog, Jason Kottke has a category dedicated to deliberate practice.
- Time Magazine: The Science of Experience (I have to say that I thought the application of deliberate practice to Clinton, McCain, and Obama was strained. But some other parts were good.)
- The Simple Dollar blog: Deliberate Practice and Personal Finance (Good, straightforward application that reaches beyond finance.)
- ImprovedLives: How to be an Expert at Anything - Stu describes how the work of Ericsson and his colleagues has motivated him in setting huge goals.
- [Added 8/26/2008] Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids: The Science of Success
- [Added 1/6/2009] Frequently Asked Q: Gladwell: Deliberate Practice (There’s a flood of new references to Ericsson and deliberate practice now that Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers has come out.)
- . . .
That dot-dot-dot is for YOU. If you know of other articles that might make a good addition to this list, please note them in the comments.
Category: The business brain, The working life
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
14 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
SciAm had a great special issue on developing experts which aligns with this thesis very well. You can buy and dload a PDF by going here: http://tinyurl.com/4uyxk9
Everybody’s been greatly moved by Randy Pausch’s story but most haven’t seen his 2nd great on-line lecture on “Time Management” which implicitly lays out his approach to self-management and development. You can find it via many sources, e.g. Wiki.
Dave — Thanks for this comment and the Scientific American link.
It’s funny you should mention Pausch’s time-management talk, because I was just listening to that last weekend. Here’s the link for that talk:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758
Companies would be well served to remember that the ONLY truly finite resource is TIME. All companies should make it a priority not to waste their people’s time.
[...] my search for more articles about “deliberate practice,” I came across this piece in TIME [...]
[...] (for large companies), in the iterative working methods of 37signals (for small companies), and in the concept of “deliberate practice” articulated by psychologist Anders Ericsson (for [...]
[...] Deliberate practice in the working world (tags: linklog gtd) [...]
[...] Deliberate practice in the working world [...]
[...] readers of this blog will detect the echo of Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice,” which emphasizes the unimportance of talent and the inescapable importance of the dogged-yet-shrewd [...]
[...] talked about it before. I’ve dedicated an omnibus post to collecting links about it. Now Geoff Colvin, the Fortune writer whose 2006 article first [...]
[...] Thursday, I started reading about deliberate practice. (See Tim Walker’s collection of deliberate practice resources). This concept is from research into what makes experts experts. What seems more [...]
[...] last year, while reading Tim Walker’s website, I heard about the idea of deliberate practice. Many people have been writing about it and talking about it recently. One of them, Geoff Colvin [...]
[...] Deliberate practice in the working world. — Hoover’s Business Insight Zone [...]
[...] I abandoned the piece, I came across this gem, which meshes with everything I’ve read about deliberate practice: ARCHIE LEACH found his vocation early and stuck to it. He studied dancing, tumbling, [...]
[...] also brings up something I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at: deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule. While I won’t dive into what these both are right now, expect to [...]
[...] Deliberate practice in the working world. [...]